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Nightmare: BEHIND THIS DOOR IS HELL

I first remember that I was walking all alone in what felt like the stillest dead of night. Everything was shadowy and dim, the world perfectly silent, pervaded by an implacable stillness, steeped in a dark and depressing mood of total solitude. Like I was completely alone in the world-- the only living entity that existed. Disconnected from this world where I had no purpose or connection to anything.
It seemed that I was surrounded by this dormant urban setting where black hazy skyscrapers were looming mysterious, and at the same time I was passing houses in a suburban residential neighborhood. It's hard to say exactly what this place was, but it didn't make sense, in the way that things tend to happen in our dreams. It was all so vague, like all the buildings and houses were just a bunch of ghostly smudges shrouded under this ghostly, nebulous gloom impervious to light. Nothing from this part of the dream can be described with much detail.

It was the omnipresent deadness that stood out most. Stiff, sterile gloom colored every aspect of what I could see. For a long time it seemed I was just wandering aimlessly through the funereal darkness of this dismal no-man's land, and the longer I spent trekking, the more unnerved I felt by the absolute stillness of the world. Hours seemed to pass as I walked through the lifeless cityscape maze, and the night was neverending. Like there was no time or that the night just continued forever. I remember the feeling of loneliness intensified and the darkness seemed to intensify as well until I was just fully absorbed by the shadows. The ambient scenery melted away into inky night blackness.

I don't know how long everything remained blotted out, but eventually these colorful bubbles of bright light started twinkling from somewhere in the distance. Bubbles of light that looked like a widespread cluster of Christmas lights glowing like a magical candy rainbow. I distinctly recall this feeling that the Christmas lights radiated this comforting warmth-- a warmth that created this familiar sense of childhood coziness-- and that enchanting feeling drew me toward the lights in a instant. The next thing I knew I was just like floating in space around the Christmas lights. There was a brief sense of this surreal fantasy escapade, just floating in the while while luminous orbs of green, red, pink, blue, and yellow danced before my eyes.

And next thing I knew, there was this rapid wave of blinding whiteness that flashed in front of me, similar to the flashing of a camera just a few inches away from my eyes. White light was washing over me and I thought I was now driving behind the wheel of a car. Things sped up and for a second or so I was driving really fast until it just hit me that I was driving but couldn't see where I was going and so I slammed down hard on the brakes.

What I remember next was walking again, but I was somewhere else and it no longer looked like night. I was in a lush green countryside where rolling hills dominated the landscape. I got the sense somehow that there was an impending thunderstorm ready to erupt at any moment. I got this ominous vibe of something really sinister lurking nearby, like something eerily watching me from all around. Somehow I could feel it, like there was just this salient bad vibe and I knew there was some mysterious danger very close to me. Something inscrutable. It was there, everywhere around me, but couldn’t be directly perceived, only felt. I then felt deeply afraid.

And then I heard people calling out to me. Their voices were indistinct but I very clearly recognized the sound of my name. I traced their source to the door of an imposing cherry red house that just appeared in front of me. The redness of the house was extraordinarily vivid, probably the most prominently colorful visual component of this dark dream. It had the quaint, rustic look of an old English country house. In front of the house I saw my paternal Grandma & Grandpa (who in reality had been dead over a decade) along with some other people that were just amorphous figures I assumed to be other relatives that were taking part in some family gathering. They were all urgently yelling at me to come inside the house. They yelled at me, saying something like it was crazy to be out there. Perhaps because of the imminent storm or some unknown, forbidden thing looming somewhere out there.

So I hastened toward the house and the next thing I knew I was inside of it. Inside the incredibly vast house with its countless rooms and measureless dimensions— and I was all alone. My grandparents and the others were gone. There was no one in that house but me.

I must have been in a living room where I could see the outside world through a circular window. The world out there looked really menacing — yet I can’t say exactly why. But I feared the darkness out there, and the darkness grew more powerful and swept around the house, shaking the walls and ceiling with rickety clamor. A rushing cascade of darkness penetrated the room as the house trembled with jarring tumult like the roaring of a hundred thunder peals all at once. The violent force of the sound struck a decibel far beyond the metric of comprehension, like it was something too loud for this world.

Then I saw all these monstrous faces crowding up outside the window, enormous faces like abnormally over-sized masks with the most horrific eyes I have ever seen. They were like the most twisted, evil-looking Halloween goblin masks with such grossly exaggerated features and insane gargoyle expressions, faces conceived only to inflict the most disturbing impression of pure horror. The faces seemed to multiply and suddenly I was seeing them pop up in different windows all around me.
Basically I was looking at the ghastliest collection of faces imaginable. All these giant diabolical faces hideously blown out of proportion
swelling up inside the windows. I have no idea how many of them there were. Maybe dozens and dozens of them. Massive that were like bizarre, grotesque masks appearing inside the windows leering at me with freakishly wide, deranged evil eyes.

The best way I can try to convey what kinds of faces I was seeing is with these images of European Carnival masks (specifically German Karnival, or Fasching). These bear the closest resemblance to what I saw in this nightmare, except that the faces I saw were darker, larger, more outlandish and grotesque:

I went wild with terror, running out of control, desperately seeking a safe place to hide, charging full-throttle through a series of nondescript rooms and massive galleries traversing the unfathomable breadth of this house. But every step of the way I felt cornered, like the infernal throng of mask-faced monsters was chasing me, gaining on me, inching closer and closer to me no matter how ridiculously fast I ran.

Next I was somewhere below the first floor of the house, like part of the basement or cellar, inside a tiny room enclosed in darkness. I didn’t know what was going on anymore. My attention became glued to the image of a familiar woman’s face glaring at me from the wall. It was the face of the Mona Lisa, and in fact I was positive in the dream that it was the real Mona Lisa that was there in that little room with me in the basement of that house. I’ve always thought there was something a bit creepy about her iconic enigmatic expression, and in this dream, this nightmare, her face was covered by an especially dark shade. Her eyes glimmered with a strange, haunting power, and everything about her just looked warped and infused with pure evil. She radiated an obscene darkness that I felt saturate me with gripping fear. There was something about this Mona Lisa that was even more frightening than all the giant mask faces I’d seen before.

I just wanted to get the hell away from her, but it that seemed impossible. I ran and ran and yet her image remained the same, without any variation in her ambiguous countenance or shift in distance. That haunting Mona Lisa watched me unflinchingly, her ghostly eyes following me, glowing weirdly, zooming in on me as though to cast a devilish spell.

Then there was the final segment of the nightmare. In my frantic effort to flee as far as possible from those watching eyes of the Mona Lisa, stuck down there in that subterranean vault of the house which seemed to go on and on forever, I came upon a door that was marked with brazen red letters. Because this was a dream the letters looked all distorted and scrambled, yet there was something freakish about their scattershot configuration, like splattered green ooze spelling out something unseemly and perverse. With my mind’s eye I was able to decipher the words, BEHIND THIS DOOR IS HELL.

I froze up in front of that door. I felt paralyzed. Doomed. It was like I was literally incapable of moving. I believed that I had only two choices left: Either open the door and go into Hell or remain stuck in the spot where I was for all of eternity. There was no going back. There was no going up. There was just me and this door to Hell.

I could hear the odious din of noises behind the door. All these garbled noises rattling from the underworld abyss. Noises of anguish mixed with satanic malice. The noises amplified quickly into an intolerably piercing pitch. Thousands of voices wailing and shrieking at me. The door in front of me was trembling. Everything was trembling. I knew that whatever things were making those terrible noises were coming for me. I knew there was no escape.

A violent paroxysm of fear swelled up inside me, like this extremely powerful puncture and weight of pressure that just exploded all at once. The door to Hell swung open and in the next instant I awoke from the nightmare, reeling in a crazed spasm of absolute horror.